A reaction from a writer surrounded by like-minded voters.
I live in a bubble. We’re college educated, we watch indie films, we listen to public radio, we read, we do yoga, we go to museums. We all voted for Kamala Harris.
So we don’t really get what just happened. We don’t quite get how so many people could be taken in by such a crude, vulgar, dangerous flim-flam man. I mean, we do understand that there’s an educational divide in the electorate. But since we all live in a bubble, surrounded by other eggheads, we really didn’t see it coming.
I was in an even more exclusive bubble in November 2016: an artists’ colony. And the heaviness I felt after the day after that election so crushed me that I abandoned the project I was there to work on, a blog and podcast called Stuff Dot Life, about the things we surround ourselves with. It just felt too trivial.
Today, like everyone else in my bubble, I feel flattened. Partly because I stayed up too late watching Steve Kornacki and took an extra half of a Trazadone before going to bed, but mostly because I’m forced to reckon with the reality of the world outside our bubble: the people who consume Joe Rogan and Fox News, who have never contributed to their public radio station or picked up a New Yorker. I’m forced to reckon with the fact that these others (who were in part brainwashed by Russian troll farms and yet, with their eyes wide open, watched the swaggering idiot go on about Hannibal Lecter) outvoted us.
I’d like to hope that I’m still safe inside my bubble — even if history tells us otherwise. I’ve had a kind of obsession over the years about which Jews left Europe in time to avoid the gas chambers, particularly in sophisticated places like Berlin, where so many were part of the elites. Too comfortable to even imagine leaving. I Google countries that will take in Americans, knowing that my husband will consider that an overreaction that will pass with time. Unless, of course, people in my peer group, in my bubble, start to talk about it.
I am going to meet a friend and take a walk, as I usually do on Wednesdays, in the bizarre 76-degree November that is the new normal. We will try to comfort each other by mourning together, by sticking to old routines, by doing bubble things.
Debbie Galant is an artist, writer, wife, and mother. This piece was reprinted with permission from her Substack, Too Much Information.
